there really was Nobody Here: my mixed feeling on The Story of Vaporwave
(this is a mirror of my review of the recently released documentary of the vaporwave music scene, Nobody Here: The Story of Vaporwave, taken from my Letterboxd account)
I'll get this one out of my chest: the audacity of the people submitting this doc on this site putting Vektroid's full name in the casting, despite her face and voice literally nowhere to be seen. that alone already cemented how much worth this movie has.
as someone who's still relatively a newbie to this musical movement (the only classic vapor album that I've listened to in full was Eccojams Vol. 1 and I'm not a fan of that tbh lol, and christtt is the only OG artists that I paid attention to), I was at an expectation to learn something new with this doc, especially since it has a lot of people who's been in it since the beginning, and yet that's not what I'm getting here.
now, considering that this project was attached to one of the big league of vapor label, My Pet Flamingo, I'm not expecting a historical lecture or even a YouTube essay type shit, but wow, they really trying to sell you The Vaporwave Experience™ so hard. most of the info presented here isn't something you can't just Google to, which I guess makes sense for an online scene like this, but c'mon man!
I'm not coming here just to see how an artist got into the scene via an ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ Tumblr blog. or Shima33 glossing over HKE's post-Rolling Stone coverage white boy crashout like it's not a bigger deal. or how Groovy Kaiju told his story of an older black women he showed her vaporwave and she said its "white guy DJ Screw" (okay, that's actually pretty funny i'll admit lol). so much of it is just them selling the You Had To Be There™ nostalgia and boasting up Electronicon and how fuckin awesome and big deal it was (which, to be fair, it is).
and please, do not have the fucking gall to say that this scene is actually pretty inclusive and cool for trans folk at the end because Floral Shoppe is good and inspiring. you know the story with that album's repress. you all know how this scene has a very colorful history of edgy, asshole white weaboos making it very hazardous to many trans folks & people of colors. you can't even get a single OG vapor trans artists on camera because you still could not get people like Shima & Vito out of the scene lol. the vaporwave scene owed her a big reparations.
like, it's cool seeing people like christtt and Nmesh in a professional documentary setting like this, and I like seeing Cat System Corp. breaking down his album News At 11, one of the defining broken transmission/signalwave album, but for being two hours long, it's way too empty for it being useful for someone completely new to the scene.
but hey, at least I got to see Yung Bae flex his mansion pool, that's cool, definitely something that 99% other artists within this scene has